Ford Motor Company and the Firestone tyre recall

This paper was prepared as the basis for a class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. It may be appropriate for public affairs, business and public policy, and/or crisis management courses at the undergraduate or graduate level. In conjunction with this case, it may be useful to use the framework for crisis management developed by Dr Ian I. Mitroff, the Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. This best practice model is discussed in ‘Managing Crises Before They Happen’, which Mitroff published in 2001 with Gus Anagnos, Vice President of Comprehensive Crisis Management. This case leads the audience through the Ford–Firestone tyre crisis from 1997—when Ford began to learn of a problem with Firestone tyres on its popular Explorer sport‐utility vehicle—up until the summer of 2001, just after Ford recalled 13 million Firestone tyres and the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration cleared Ford of further investigation into potential defects in the Explorer. The case addresses potential causes of the tyre problem, how Ford handled the crisis from a corporate public affairs perspective and, tangentially, how Firestone handled the issue. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Similar Ends, Differing Means: Contractualism and Civil Service Reform in Denmark and New Zealand

State sector reform was an integral component of the radical economic and social policy changes enacted by New Zealand governments between 1984 and 1991. This reform replaced the traditional tenured public service with a contractual regime. Through a comparison with Denmark, it is shown that New Zealand's reforms were not unique. Similar reforms were enacted in Denmark. But contrary to what occurred in New Zealand, the Danish reforms had already begun in the 1960s, and have since been gradually expanded. The parallel contractual regimes introduced in the two countries are accounted for by an increasing demand among politicians to secure a civil service that is responsive to political executive demands. However, because of institutional differences and diverging regulatory regimes, the strategic approaches in the two countries have been different. Whereas the New Zealand approach was dominated by an appeal to a coherent and sophisticated body of theoretical knowledge, combined with strict formalization, the Danish strategy has been based on political bargaining with the civil service unions. In both cases the reforms rest on critical assumptions regarding their positive and negative implications.     

Testing Explanations of Strategic Voting in Legislatures: A Reexamination of the Compromise of 1790

A difficult yet prevalent problem in legislative politics is how to assess explanations when observable actions may not represent true (and unobserved) legislator preferences. We present a method for analyzing the validity of theoretical/historical accounts that unifies theory, history, and measurement. We argue that approaches to testing accounts of legislative behavior which are theoretically and historically agnostic are not always best and present an approach which: (1) forms an explicit explanation of behavior (here a simple dynamic voting game) that yields estimable parameter constraints, and (2) tests these constraints using a customized empirical model that is as consistent as possible with the explanation. We demonstrate the method using legislative voting data from the first Congress (1789–1791). Using the idea of sophisticated equivalents from voting theory we subject the traditional account of the “Compromise of 1790” to a statistical test and find that there is reason to doubt the claim that legislators of the time believed the specified log roll was taking place. The results suggest that the capital location and assumption issues were resolved independently.     

Bargaining and Learning While Fighting

Much of the existing formal work on war models the decision to go to war as a game-ending, costly lottery. This article relaxes this assumption by treating war as a costly process during which the states run the risk of military collapse. The model also allows for uncertainty over either the cost of fighting or the distribution of power. The analysis makes four contributions to the growing costly-process literature: (i) the present model provides a more general treatment of the learning process that occurs when states are uncertain about the distribution of power, (ii) it explicitly compares the bargaining and learning processes for the two different sources of uncertainty, (iii) it suggests a way to empirically distinguish wars arising from these two sources, and (iv) it shows that the equilibrium dynamics of informational accounts of war may be quite sensitive to the underlying bargaining environment through which information is conveyed .